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A Start-Up Provides a Picture of Our Shape-Shifting Planet

The development over a year of an area of Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia.Credit USGS/NASA Landsat and Planet Labs

The techno-futurist Stewart Brand has said “we are as gods” for the way humans have profoundly changed how the planet works. Now a start-up in San Francisco is offering fresh evidence.

The start-up, Planet Labs, has posted a gallery of images of Earth that illustrate how much people affect the planet, and how rapidly we move, crop, build on and otherwise reshape our world.

“The first thing you notice is the beauty,” said Will Marshall, chief executive of Planet Labs, speaking of his company’s photos, taken at an altitude of 600 kilometers, about 370 miles. “Then you compare them to older images, and you see that something has changed — a river has been moved, there are new buildings, a reservoir has been built or drained.”

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The effects of drought over a year at a reservoir in Lake County, Calif.Credit USGS/NASA Landsat and Planet Labs

Mr. Marshall’s point is self-serving as well as philosophical. By mid-September, Planet Labs will have about 40 satellites, each weighing about nine pounds and the size of a shoe box, in a polar orbit over the planet. It aims to have over 100 by the end of the year. After that, the company figures it can deliver a nearly complete photo mosaic of almost all of the planet, every 24 hours.

There is also much to what he says, however. In terms of physical transformation, images of modern China, like the areas around the Beijing airport or the coal mines in Shanxi Province, barely show any natural contours, or even the rounding of age on human structures. Seemingly everything is new or under construction. In a “before and after” image, a dam in Brazil has over the last year lost much of its water, and the nearby coffee crop has declined.

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The effects of drought over a year at the Represa Três Marias reservoir in Brazil.Credit USGS/NASA Landsat and Planet Labs

Even seemingly natural events on these grids, each 11 kilometers by 16 kilometers (about 7 miles by 10 miles), show the human hand. The red of a salt flat at the bottom of San Francisco Bay is concentrated from being penned in, and the water is evaporating. A far tip of Norway seems like rugged mountains, but from the left-hand side of the image there is the angular taming of a road, and a growing farm area.

“Humans are having such an impact now,” Mr. Marshall said, “one in four of our Earth images shows agriculture. You see evidence of some human activity in almost all of them.” Even in a desert image, it’s hard to find something that isn’t human.

We look at images of Mars, and wonder at the Red Planet, but to some eyes its most singular aspect is its sameness. To Mr. Marshall, an avid hiker, “I usually think of what we’d miss if we ever left Earth. There is this vivid density of life, this rich geography.”

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The crossing of the Han river in China in 2013 and a year later.Credit USGS/NASA Landsat and Planet Labs